With its charcoal façade and ethereal interior, this futuristic home in Dubai reflects Roham Shamekh’s belief that architecture can be a vessel for the soul.
We’re often told to trust the process, an attitude that encourages having faith in the journey rather than focusing on immediate results. It is an approach that Roham Shamekh began applying at a very young age through the power of manifestation, and now, at only 30, the multidisciplinary artist and designer is reaping the results. With his amorphically futuristic objects, Shamekh has created a universe poised between craft and technology, reality and fantasy. And people have been taking notice, including the likes of musicians and entrepreneurs such as Rihanna and Pharrell, and the French culture and fashion icon Michèle Lamy. “I am interested in creating a new language and a dialogue around my work that is particularly tailored to Gen Z-ers and the next generation,” he says. “I like to think ahead into the future.”
The greatest design stories from AD Middle East, delivered to your inbox
The designer has recently completed work on his first home in Dubai’s Jumeirah neighbourhood, the charcoal villa contrasting starkly with the otherwise beige-toned beach suburb. All in all, the futuristic home is a manifestation of his philosophy: the idea that creativity, when aligned with the soul, becomes a force of transformation. Over the course of two years, Shamekh has re-engineered what was once a modest structure into a “metaphysical portal”, dissolving the boundaries between art, objects and architecture, with sacred arches and geometric lines conjuring a De Chirico painting brought to life.
Step inside and you’re immediately immersed in Shamekh’s vision of “soulful design”. This is not just a stylistic approach, but a spiritual one – a belief that every space, every object, carries energy, intention and soul. “I don’t see this as a house,” he says. “It’s a sanctuary. A place of rebirth. It’s a world I’ve built that speaks to the future, but it is rooted in the now – in energy, in consciousness and in the elements.”
Shamekh’s reinterpretation of the villa begins at the threshold, where water flows alongside metallic flora, flanked by his own twin avatars, evoking life and death in eternal dialogue. It’s a form of initiation. Candelabras rise like botanical relics from an imagined future, while the air is charged with the feeling of entering somewhere sacred. This is the first sign that you’ve stepped into a dimension where the five elements – earth, fire, water, air and ether – have been reprogrammed as architecture.
The structure itself was stripped and re-envisioned, maintaining the bones of the old villa but reshaped into a minimalist landscape with Brutalist undertones, softened by organic materials and forms. Shamekh’s hallmark glass doors blur the line between entrance and window, opening wide to dissolve interior and exterior, inviting the garden, and its palm and banana trees, into the heart of the home. Concrete, resin, wood and bronze coalesce into a raw yet refined materiality, anchoring the space in both weight and lightness.
Inside, the journey unfolds like a curated gallery. Walls were torn down to create openness; partitions now allow the space to breathe and shift. Bedrooms gave way to one expansive welcome zone, where visitors can move stage by stage through curated installations – an experiential unfolding of Shamekh’s inner world. Each object, from the biomorphic coffee tables to the cherub-torso dining chairs, is charged with symbolic meaning and metaphysical intent.
The dining room, aligned with the element of fire, becomes a ceremonial space for manifestation, anchored by Shamekh’s Ovo Man “heartbeat” table in radiant green: “the colour of the heart chakra”. The living room features sculptures made from his own thumbprints that serve as altars to creative pressure and release. Everywhere, the artichoke flower – Shamekh’s recurring emblem of rebirth – appears on candelabras and sculptural seating, both strange and sublime.
Technology and spirit dance together fluidly. Intelligent lighting sculptures respond to mood, mimicking a heartbeat. Shamekh’s avatars, crafted from resin, aluminium and porcelain, look skyward, channelling universal energy. Even the staircase becomes a symbolic spine – a geometric expression of memory and movement, inspired by the Japanese minimalist lines now synonymous with the designer’s Ovo Man furniture series.
Beyond the poetic architecture lies Shamekh’s standalone glass-walled studio, the nucleus of his process. Here, he works alone at night, crafting materials by hand: melting aluminium, layering resin and spraying paint on metal, or sketching worlds that emerge from dreamscapes and meditative visions. “I want people to feel something,” he says. “That they’ve stepped into a new realm, where creativity is consciousness.” In a world of surface and speed, Shamekh offers a radical alternative: a soulful architecture that dares to go deeper. @rohamshamekh
The greatest design stories from AD Middle East, delivered to your inbox
